The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

what storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.